Arena Profile: Peter Lehner

Peter Lehner is the executive director of NRDC and NRDC Action Fund. He is responsible for guiding NRDC’s policy positions, advocacy strategies, communications plans, development and administration, and managing NRDC’s seven offices and for leading the Action Fund’s political activities. Since Peter’s return to NRDC in 2007, NRDC has opened new offices in Beijing and Chicago, started a Center for Market Innovation, and expanded both its policy and communications capacity.

Previously, Peter served as chief of the Environmental Protection Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s office for eight years. He supervised all environmental litigation by the state, prosecuting a wide variety of polluters and developing innovative multi-state strategies targeting global warming, acid rain, and smog causing emissions. Peter previously served at NRDC as a senior attorney in charge of the water program. Before that, he created and led the environmental prosecution unit for New York City. Peter holds an AB in philosophy and mathematics from Harvard College and is a graduate of Columbia University Law School, where he continues to teach environmental law. He also has extensive experience in sustainable farming and green business.

Peter Lehner's Recent Discussions

Obama administration: Drill, now, drill!

The epic scale of the BP disaster and its aftermath have made it clear that prevention is the only real option for protecting against devastating spills. Whether or not you agree with the Obama administration’s decision to lift the moratorium, a essential question remains nearly six months after the spill: What will it take to prevent another blowout?

Until we have that answer, we’re still just gambling with the Gulf.

We all can agree that we need to put Americans in the Gulf back to work – and we need to keep them at work. That includes the fishermen, restaurant owners, and tourism industry workers that rely on a clean, healthy Gulf to bring home dinner for their children and billions of dollars each year for the economy. These industries deserves answers before new deepwater drilling begins.

The government has created stronger safety standards that will make sure future drilling is done more responsibly. While these new rules are sound, we simply don’t know if they can prevent a repeat of this blowout. To truly prevent another Gulf oil disaster, we must fully understand what caused this one in the first place.

Should Ken Salazar stay or go?

The rule announced by Secretary Ken Salazar will improve the safety of offshore drilling operations. This rule is a positive step toward strengthening the safeguards we need to help prevent a repeat of the catastrophic blow out that poisoned Gulf waters, threw thousands of Americans out of work and destroyed rich habitat, fish and wildlife. The rule reflects hard lessons learned from this disaster at grievous cost to the Gulf, its people and our nation.

The new protections add a needed measure of transparency, oversight and certainty to the drilling process, from the well design to the way pipes are positioned and cemented in place. They require that decision-makers on rigs have proper training in offshore operations; that blow out preventers be in working order and up to the job; and that remotely operated vehicles be in place at all times, along with standby crews able to guide them. It is too early in the accident investigation process to say with certainty whether these new rules would have prevented the Deepwater Horizon accident or sped up the cleanup and containment efforts. But this rule will certainly help minimize the threat of future drilling accidents on the Outer Continental Shelf.

Legislation is needed to reduce the risks of offshore oil development to our environment. Most important, we need to move faster to break our addiction to oil and keep moving the country toward cleaner, safer and more sustainable sources of power and fuel. That is the great lesson of this disaster.

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